Schlesinger’s Syllabus

The thirteen books you must read to understand America

When Tocqueville, a twenty-five-year-old French nobleman, arrived in the United States in 1831, he was more interested in democracy than he was in America—or rather he was interested in America as a test case of the “great democratic revolution” that, he felt, was “universal and irresistible” and destined to transform the world. The grand question was whether this revolution would lead to “democratic tyranny.” Though concerned about the “tyranny of the majority,” Tocqueville believed that the power of voluntary associations and intermediate institutions had put America on the road to democratic liberty. He traveled around the country from May 1831 to February 1832 (and never came back). But in those nine months he saw more deeply into American institutions and the American character than anyone before or since. More than a century and a half later, his great work still illuminates American society.

Essays and Lecture

Ralph Waldo Emerson (Library of America, 1983). No one has expressed the American faith in the sovereignty of the individual more brilliantly, lyrically, and sardonically than Emerson. Born in 1803, trained for the Unitarian ministry, he left the pulpit for the lecture platform, from which he expounded his transcendentalist philosophy in crackling aphorisms.

Some critics have decried what they see as Emerson’s shallow optimism, but underneath his alleged disregard of the problem of evil and his allegedly guileless faith in intuition lie shrewd, skeptical, hard-edged, almost ruthless Yankee insights into human nature. “For every benefit you receive,” Emerson said, “a tax is levied.” It is this tough side of Emerson that appealed in the nineteenth century to Hawthorne, Carlyle, and Nietzsche and that appeals to postmodernists today. The Library of America volume contains his masterly study of national character English Traits , the penetrating biographical portraits in Representative Men , and his essays. For the tough-minded Emerson, read “History,” “Self-Reliance,” “Experience,” and, in The Conduct of Life , “Power” and “Fate.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852). She was forty years old, the wife of a professor of biblical literature, the mother of seven children, when her indignation over the forced return of slaves to bondage under the Fugitive Slave Act led her to write the most influential novel in American history. The book sold three hundred thousand copies in its first year—equivalent to a sale of three million copies in the 1990s. “So this is the little lady who made this big war,” Lincoln is supposed to have said to her.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is remembered for its vivid depiction of the horrors of slavery—and often misremembered, because so many images derive from the stage versions rather than from the novel itself. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is far more than the sentimental melodrama of “the Tom shows.” It is a wonderfully shrewd and nuanced panorama of American life in the decade before the Civil War, rich in its variety of characters, settings, and perceptions. Mrs. Stowe may not in every respect meet contemporary standards of political correctness, but she was radical for her time in her insights and sympathies—one of the first, for example, to use the term human rights . Frederick Douglass called Uncle Tom’s Cabin a book “plainly marked by the finger of God.”

Speeches and Writings

Abraham Lincoln (two volumes, Library of America, 1989). The most miraculous of Presidents, he was the best writer and the most intense moralist, with the most disciplined intelligence and the greatest strength of purpose, and yet he sprang out of the bleakest and most unpromising of circumstances. Confronting the supreme test and tragedy of American nationhood, he saw the crisis in perspective—“with malice toward none, with charity for all”—but never let perspective sever the nerve of action.

His Gettysburg Address amended the work of the Founding Fathers by leaving no doubt that the United States was a single nation based on the proposition that all men are created equal. And his Second Inaugural affirmed human limitations by declaring that “the Almighty has His own purposes”—purposes that erring mortals could never ascertain. “Men are not flattered,” he later wrote, “by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however … is to deny that there is a God governing the world.”